“Move it, Dev,” she was practically shrieking. “Hurry it up, will you?”
“I’m trying my hardest, but it’s really heavy. These covers weigh about as much as I do.”
I ran my hand across the inner surface of the iron plate. In the middle of it, I felt something protruding and grasped it with my fingers.
“Here it is, Liza. It’s a hook,” I said. “That means there’s a pole to pry it open with, here somewhere, probably hanging on the wall right nearby.”
Liza dashed to the wall and began to search for it, all around the space and high above her head. “Got it, Dev!”
She removed the eighteen-inch pole from where it hung on the wall and handed it up to me. It took me three tries to catch the manhole cover hook with the end of it, but finally I did.
I wrapped my left arm through one of the higher rungs of the iron ladder and pushed the pole and cover as hard as I could.
Nothing moved.
I tried a second time with no greater success.
I bent my neck and climbed up another step, reared back with my right arm, and gave it my best shot.
The manhole cover lifted almost an inch and then instantly fell back in place with a clang that had the fury of a loud thunderclap.
“Oh, no, Dev,” Liza said. “We’ll never get out of here.”
“Don’t jinx me, girl,” I said. “I’ve finally got a use for all this upper-arm strength from my swim exercises and racing. I can do this, I promise.”
It took three more attempts before I could make the cover move. This time I had my left leg intertwined on the ladder and both arms on the pole.
The manhole cover seemed to groan as it lifted upward over my head, and with one huge shove of the thick metal pole to propel it, I shifted it onto its edge. It started to roll away out of my sight from the space it had opened above us—flooding the shaft with sunlight—and I could hear the sound of cars braking sharply and horns blowing madly in the street where it must have landed.
Liza and I had found our escape hatch.
31
Liza and I were sitting on the back—on top of the trunk—of a blue-and-white patrol car by the time Booker reached us twenty minutes later. The two really nice patrolmen who had lifted us out of the shaft had bought us each a soda and ice-cream cone. The first thing we did was ask them to text Booker and tell him where we were.
They were the cops who’d responded to the runaway manhole cover that had stopped traffic on Eastern Parkway. They were pretty surprised to look down and see two of us—me clinging to the ladder and Liza pacing in circles below me—waiting for help in the stairwell of the tunnel.
Liza jumped off the car faster than I did and went running to Booker, grabbing him around the waist, and pressing her head into his chest. She was exactly where I wanted to be at that moment, but there was only room for one of us.
“I was searching all over the basement for you two,” Booker said. “Where’d you go?”
“Ever hear of a ghost station?” I asked, wiping my filthy hands on my jeans. “And how’d you know to come to the basement anyway?”
“Ghost stations don’t exist,” Booker said, breaking loose from Liza.
“Bet that, Booker D,” I said.
“You texted me, didn’t you? That’s how I knew to head to the basement,” Booker said, holding his phone out to me. “You said you had found Preston Savage.”
“I thought texts didn’t work in the library,” I said. “Wait a minute. How long ago did that come through?”
It had taken Liza and me more than an hour to get ourselves out of the abandoned tunnel. Preston Savage—who had taken my phone from me—must have surfaced much earlier. It was his exit from the library that triggered the text to go off to Booker.
“Maybe forty-five minutes ago,” Booker said. “I’ve been looking for you guys, with the library security team, all over the basement. How’d you wind up here?”
“Tell you that in a minute,” I said. I was completely energized again. “That must mean that Preston Savage got away. We have to send out an APB right now.”
“What’s an APB?” Liza asked.
“Cop talk, Liza. All points bulletin. We’ve got to find this man before he gets away,” I said, turning to the police officers.
“Just chill, Dev,” Booker said. “Done with that.”
“What?”
“Preston Savage has been arrested,” he said. “You two besties cornered the guy and nailed him in the act. The detectives took him out of here in handcuffs, Dev. They think you girls are superheroes.”
“We cornered him?” I said. “He’s the one who locked us in a stairwell that led down to an abandoned train station. I’d say he had the upper hand. We just had to find our way out of the ghost station.”
“Dev,” Booker said, shaking a finger at me. “Stop exaggerating. Although that’s going to be the least of your troubles when your mother finds out about this—what do we label it?—this adventure.”
I grabbed Booker’s arm. “Will you call her for me? Does she know Liza and I are okay?”
“Let’s just say she doesn’t know yet that you weren’t always okay. She’s kind of tied up in saving the world, big-time,” Booker said. “I wasn’t going to face Aunt Blaine till I had you two back to business. I stayed in touch with my mother and all I told her was that we’d see her tonight in the park. If I didn’t have you and Liza with me by then, I might as well just pull a Houdini on myself.”
“I owe you for that one,” I said.
“You sure do.”
I suddenly remembered our third suspect. “What about Natasha’s friend, Jack Williams? Was there any sign of him today?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s a good guy, Dev,” Booker said. “You’re going to have to rethink your coincidence theory. Jack’s proof of that. He just picked a bad day to go to the library.”
“How did they get Preston Savage?” Liza asked. “That’s much more important.”
I was so wired up talking to Booker I didn’t even notice a man approaching our group from the direction of the library.
“When I came out of the map exhibit, I had Walter Blodgett with me.”
“You actually talked to him?” Liza asked. “Was he in on it with Savage?”
“Total opposite,” Booker said. “We decided to come outside to talk and were on our way to a bench in the plaza. The minute I stepped out of the library, some alarm went off around the corner and then I got the text from you.”
“That we were in the basement with Savage?”
“Yeah.”
“That means he was out of the basement already, too, if my phone worked.”
“I didn’t know he had your phone—I just assumed it was you—so I ran back in and got security to go down to the basement with me.”
“Backup,” I said, nodding at him. “Good policing, Booker.”
“Where was Walter Blodgett during this?” Liza asked.
“I’d like to answer that myself.” The well-dressed man who’d been on his way down the sidewalk stepped into our circle and introduced himself. “I’m Walter Blodgett.”
The frown on my face sent a signal to Booker. I was still thinking of the punch that Blodgett had thrown, and our suspicions that he had been an accomplice to Savage.
“Lighten up, Dev,” Booker said. “Mr. Blodgett’s on our side.”
“I can’t begin to express my gratitude to each of you,” Blodgett said. “To you, Liza, and to you, Devlin. Booker has already told me so much about you.”
“You know Preston Savage?” Liza asked.
“Our professional world of rare maps and books is a very small one,” Blodgett said. “I’ve been an acquaintance of Preston’s for many years, and sadly, in the last two or three, I came to mistrust him.”
Liza and I exchanged glances—practically smiles—for the first time in hours.
“Preston came into our world as an academic,” Blodgett said, “as something of a scholar. I, on
the other hand, am a businessman. When I first had suspicions that my colleague might have been stealing valuable pieces from time to time, I became quite unpopular in library circles.”
“Why’s that?” Liza asked.
“I had no proof, Liza,” he said. “No one believed me.”
“Been there,” I said.
“So I remained quiet about my suspicions,” Blodgett said, “until Preston and I crossed paths one night, at another library.”
“The Champlain exhibit,” Booker said, pointing at me. “Harvard Yard, Dev. All props to you.”
“You punched Preston Savage!” I said, so happy to connect all the dots.
“Not my finest moment, Devlin.”
“You rocked it, Mr. Blodgett.”
“Resorting to violence? I don’t think so,” he said, “but I was desperate to stop him.”
“What did he do?”
“That night at Harvard, Preston never showed his face at the exhibition that we were all there to see,” Blodgett said. “But just as I was about to leave, I saw him coming out of a private room, tucking some piece of paper into his sleeve. I opened the door to the room he’d been in as he was walking out of the library, and an atlas was on the table. I carefully turned a few pages in the old book, and sure enough, two maps had been removed from it. The tears were quite obvious.”
“What did you do?” Liza asked.
“I didn’t dare tell a librarian and be scorned again, so I left the building after him. I wanted to accuse him to his face,” Blodgett said. “I got lucky because he had driven to Cambridge, and so he had stopped to put something in the trunk of his car. Probably the stolen maps.”
“The clue in the Puzzle Palace,” I said. “Preston Savage’s parking ticket from that night in Harvard Yard.”
“I called out his name, and he slammed the trunk to walk toward me,” Blodgett said, pausing to get the details right. “I made my accusation, told him that I was going to call the police to open the trunk of his car, and that’s when he took a swing at me.”
“Did he hit you?” Liza asked.
“No, but he didn’t miss by much,” the man said, lowering his head and his voice. “So I punched Preston Savage. One time, but squarely on his nose.”
“You mean he’s the one who called the police?” Booker said.
“I did, just as I had promised to do,” Blodgett said. “But when they arrived, it was Preston Savage who had the bloody nose.”
“And he wouldn’t let them open the trunk of his car,” I said.
“Exactly. And since they viewed me as the violent attacker, they didn’t believe it was necessary to get a search warrant.”
“You were arrested,” Liza said, “and Savage declined to press charges.”
“Yes, he just wanted to get out of town with his stolen goods. I tried to tell the police what I thought had happened, but Savage was the gentleman scholar with the injury to his face, and I was the angry businessman. They didn’t seem to understand the value of one missing page of a rare book.”
“You’ve been after him for all this time,” I said.
“That’s why I’m so grateful to you young ladies,” Blodgett said. “When Booker got your text, he excused himself and ran off to find security. I was standing on the library steps, figuring he’d only be gone a few minutes.”
“What happened?” Liza asked.
“A moment or so before your text rang through, I heard an alarm go off. You know the kind? Like a bell that rings when you go through a fire door that isn’t supposed to be opened.”
“Where was it?” I said.
“Somewhere on the side of the library. I saw several uniformed cops come running, so I walked around to see what they were after,” Blodgett said. “It was some kind of trapdoor that came out of the library basement.”
“See, Liza?” I said. “I knew Savage only locked us underground because he had his own way to escape.”
“Not such a good one as ours,” she said with a grin.
“Not good at all,” Blodgett said. “As Preston was climbing out of the space, the cops stopped to question him. He was giving them some sort of story about what had happened, and he had some papers rolled up, which he was holding in his hands. I interrupted the officers and told them the papers—if they were maps—were likely to have been stolen.”
“What did Preston Savage do?” I asked.
“He protested to the police, of course. Called me a liar and some other unpleasant names, but unlike the situation at Harvard, this time the officers walked him back inside the library with me to see which one of us was telling the truth. The head of the map division found the book Savage had been studying in the carrel where he’d left it a bit earlier.”
“Left it when he had to get rid of us,” Liza said.
“What the three of you have been up to all week,” Walter Blodgett said, “has been an enormous public service.”
“We didn’t set out to do that, sir,” I said. “We were just trying to get someone to take what Liza saw seriously. We never expected that it would lead us into danger, or to anything like this.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how it will affect our ability—scholars, librarians, booksellers everywhere—to tell the history of the world, for generations to come, as it has been told for centuries, through books and atlases and the rarest of old charts.”
Liza grabbed me in a bear hug and squeezed me hard.
“You and your friends, Devlin Quick, have done something my colleagues and I have not been able to do, despite all our wisdom and experience,” Blodgett said. “You’ve captured a map thief.”
32
One of the things I love most about my mother is that she has never been the kind of person to say “I told you so.” I’m trying to learn from her example.
By the time Liza and I got home late Saturday afternoon, after a debriefing by the Major Case Squad detectives who’d been summoned to the Brooklyn Central Library, I was really running on empty.
The Major Case lieutenant had told Sam Cody about the events of the day, and Sam—who really gets that my mother and I are lifelines for each other—sat my mother down to give her the blow by blow of our brush with a very bad man. I didn’t envy him that assignment.
Sam also convinced the guys that Liza and I did not have to accompany the Crime Scene Unit detectives back into the ghost station to photograph and process the platform and route to our escape hatch. Our path through the dusty remains of an abandoned subway tunnel should have been obvious to anyone, and I couldn’t face having to go back down there.
I don’t think I’d ever been hugged as tightly as my mother hugged me when we walked into the apartment. She did the same thing to Liza, too. She wanted to be sure we were unharmed and uninjured. She made us each drink a mug full of hot chocolate—despite the warmth of the day—because it was my favorite comfort food and she considered tea a remedy for the sick and the old.
There was no scolding and no second-guessing. Not a hint of an attitude.
“How mad are you really, Mom?” I asked when Liza went to take the first shower and I was alone with my mother.
“Not the least bit, Dev,” she said. “I couldn’t be more proud.”
“But I didn’t listen to you. Over and over again.”
“Liza saw something wrong and you believed in her, Dev. You backed her up when even I had doubts,” she said. “You and Liza and Booker were searching for the truth, and you actually found it. That’s what justice is.”
When Liza came back into the bedroom with her bathrobe on, smelling so much better than she had all afternoon, my mother sat her down on the bed and began brushing her hair—telling her the same things she had said to me and trying to restore Liza’s sense of well-being.
I made the shower as hot as I could stand it and stood in it for at least ten minutes. I wanted every trace of the subway tunnel erased from my body, even though it would live in my brain for a very long time. I think I had spent all my c
ourage in the dark confines of the ghost station earlier this afternoon.
Both Liza and I still voted to go to the park for the evening. I didn’t want us to be alone with our thoughts, reliving the day.
We walked over in a posse—my mother, Sam, Natasha, Liza, and me—meeting up with the Dibbles at our usual spot, pretty close to the stage.
Once we spread our blankets, I planted myself right next to my mother. I wasn’t very hungry, so I just nibbled at the food. When she was finished eating, I stretched out with my head in her lap, needing to be close to her and sort of coddled by her like I was still a kid.
Liza had Booker on one side of her and Sam on the other. Pretty good seating arrangement if you ask me. We decided to stay on our blankets, picnic and relax, rather than take our seats in the amphitheater. Liza was subdued, too, but happier with her companion—and with her fate—than Juliet.
It wasn’t the right night for a post-performance photo op with the stars. All I wanted to do was go home and get in bed. I held my mother’s hand all the way back to the apartment and slept better knowing that she was just on the other side of my bedroom wall.
She was the first person I saw Sunday morning.
“Hey, Dev,” my mother said, stroking my head. “It’s ten o’clock.”
I pulled the sheet up over my head. “I want to sleep in,” I said.
“No can do.”
I opened one eye. “It’s my RDO, Mom. Every cop gets a regular day off.”
“You’ll have to pick another one,” she said, tickling the middle of my stomach. “You get a delicious breakfast—my only specialty—but then we have to be in my office by noon.”
I pulled the sheet up again. “Oh, no. We have to go through the story again?”
“Not exactly,” she said, getting up to wake Liza, too. “Mayor Bloomfield wants to meet the three of you. How’s that for a reason?”
I was out of bed in a flash.
I thought my Ditchley blazer and clean white cotton pants would be an appropriate outfit for my mayoral meet and greet. My mother helped Liza pick out something sharp to wear, too.
Sam showed up half an hour later, in time for my mother’s somewhat overcooked eggs and bacon. But I wasn’t going to complain about anything this morning.
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